Time to start up the F-22 line again? I said at the time of cancelling that putting all of America’s air superiority eggs in the F-35 basket may prove one of the worst strategic decisions ever - with news emerging that China has indeed hacked the program leaving it vulnerable to who knows what kind of counter measures and shortening the timeline possibly by leaps and bounds for China’s successful development of similar technology, looks like maybe I was right [although admittedly continuing improvements viz unmanned stealth aircraft may change the dynamics here].
There are countries, allies of ours, who wanted the F-22, wanted it badly - the reason we didn’t sell it to them was to safeguard the technology from essentially Russia and China - well, that doesn’t seem to matter anymore - Russia’s building what looks to be a pretty impressive 5th generation fighter of their own, and by aggressively backward engineering Russian technology and hacking ours China’s probably not too far behind them. So start up the F-22 again, sell it to Australia, sell it to Japan, sell it to Israel - by doing that you could effectively almost double our inventory of the plane, and it wouldn’t cost us anything - hell, sell it to Taiwan - that would make for a fun week.
